Bliss, Guilt, and Weaving

I did it again...I took time away from the family for my own relaxation and renewal! It was fabulous, but also punctuated here and there with feelings of guilt...Leaving my poor sweet friend with my three terrors as well as her own two kids for five hours, only to hear (in a text that didn't reach me until after I regained cell service on the way home) that Kyan had been playing with knives in the kitchen and scared the bejesus out of her. Then there was this nagging feeling that maybe the reason Kyan has been acting out lately is the recent increase of time I am taking for myself...to which my dear friend (who was joining me for said relaxation and renewal) promptly replied that I was being ludicrous...I hope she's right.

The bottom line is that parenting is hard and we need to take space now and then. I hate to say it for fear of offending working parents everywhere (keep in mind that I once was one!), but that time away from home when other parents go to work is a blessing that sometimes goes unrecognized. I have mornings where I seriously want to run after Ben's car as it pulls out of the driveway and scream, "TAKE ME WITH YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!" It's not that I don't love being home with the boys, trust me, I thank the stars everyday that I am not juggling teaching full time with mothering three boys. The problem is that if I don't take time away from them then I don't cherish my time with them nearly as much. I don't "get off of work" at any point during the day (or the night for that matter), so I need to take some scheduled mental health breaks!

So I set the intention to take some space for myself...I am taking a writing workshop that meets each week and doing a few other day long workshops. I have a book club that meets once a month and actually talks about the book we read (there may also be wine involved). I took two days and nights to go back to Breitenbush and sit around in hot water all day and eat amazing vegetarian food. I even went out one night not long ago to see my beautiful friend sing...It was crazy to be "out" again and of course I stayed out a bit too late and had to pay for it in the world of motherdom the next day, but it was worth it!

I truly believe that taking this time to myself brings me clarity and I am much more grounded in my ability to mother my children...well, at least to mother them well. It is much easier to take this time now that I am home with them everyday. I know that when I was working I felt nothing but guilt when I did things for myself, so I just stopped doing them. Sometimes I want to laugh when I look back at those days and remember how difficult I thought it all was...but, it was...I guess difficult is what difficult is when you are in that moment. Right now I have reached difficult on a whole new level.

Twins are hard. I guess most people wouldn't dispute that fact, so I won't bother defending myself with a paragraph long dissertation about why twins are hard, but I feel the need to acknowledge that they Are. Really. Hard.  They are also amazing. I suppose that is the guilty critic in my head that is apologizing for admitting that I am not a supermom who flies through my days wondering how other people can complain about the difficulty of raising children...I wish I was that mom, but I'm not. They are amazing...AND...amazingly hard.

So, I spent some time soaking and talking and soaking and eating and talking and soaking and talking and eating and sleeping and eating and soaking...and, it was fabulous. I experienced that strange reality where people see me as myself rather than the frenzied mother chasing her three children around various places. It was neat, but it also felt a bit wrong. I felt like I was telling people about my boys whenever I got the chance because then there were people there who could actually see me as who I really am. I am me...that person in and of myself...but, within that person is that frenzied mother and she cannot truly be separated from myself. I suppose that's the point, isn't it? No matter what we do or where we are we will always be both of those people. We cannot go back to a time when we were not mothers and BE that person again. There is a cord that binds us tightly to our mothering self and no matter how far away we may attempt to stray, it will hold us tight. That is easier for me to envision; what's difficult for me to envision is that the opposite is true as well: That self, the one before the kids that we see as just us without the mother self, that self is always there, too. We are also bound to that person and that person is bound to us. Writing reminds me of that. When I write I hear her voice, I feel her pain and her joy, I become her and I weave her in and out of my mothering self.

This is where I think I am going with the intentions I have set for myself. I am attempting to tighten that weave so that I can feel the entirety of myself in everything that I do. If I can weave a big beautiful blanket then perhaps I can hold it tight around myself when I begin to lose my way...